How ISIS Games Twitter

The militant group that conquered northern Iraq is deploying a sophisticated social-
media strategy.

J.M. BERGER, JUN 16, 2014

The advance of an army used to be marked by war drums. Now it’s marked by volleys
of tweets.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni militant group that seizedIraq’s
second-largest city last week and is now pledging to take Baghdad, has honed this new
technique—most recently posting photos on Twitter of an alleged mass killing of Iraqi
soldiers. But what’s often overlooked in press coverage is that ISIS doesn’t just have
strong, organic support online. It also employs social-media strategies that inflate and
control its message. Extremists of all stripes are increasingly using social media
to recruit, radicalize and raise funds, and ISIS is one of the most adept practitioners of
this approach.

One of ISIS's more successful ventures is an Arabic-language Twitter app called The
Dawn of Glad Tidings, or just Dawn. The app, an official ISIS product promoted by its
top users, is advertised as a way to keep up on the latest news about the jihadi group.

Hundreds of users have signed up for the app on the web or on their Android phones
through the Google Play store. When you download the app, ISIS asks for a fair amount
of personal data:

Once you sign up, the app will post tweets to your account—the content of which is
decided by someone in ISIS’s social-media operation. The tweets include links,
hashtags, and images, and the same content is also tweeted by the accounts of everyone
else who has signed up for the app, spaced out to avoid triggering Twitter’s spam-
detection algorithms. Your Twitter account functions normally the rest of the time,
allowing you to go about your business.

Tweets Sent by ISIS's Social-Media App Over a 2-Hour

Period
The app first went into wide use in April 2014, but its posting activity has ramped up
during the group’s latest offensive, reaching an all-time high of almost 40,000 tweets
in one day as ISIS marched into the northern Iraqi city of Mosul last week. On Sunday,
as the media reported on the group’s advance toward Baghdad, hundreds of Dawn app
users began sending thousands of tweets featuring an image of an armed jihadist gazing
at the ISIS flag flying over the city, with the text, “We are coming, Baghdad” (see
below).

The volume of these tweets was enough to make any search for “Baghdad” on Twitter
generate the image among its first results, which is certainly one means of intimidating
the city’s residents.

The app is just one way ISIS games Twitter to magnify its message. Another is the use
of organized hashtag campaigns, in which the group enlists hundreds and sometimes
thousands of activists to repetitively tweet hashtags at certain times of day so that they
trend on the social network. This approach also skews the results of a popular Arabic
Twitter account called @ActiveHashtags that tweets each day’s top trending tags.
When ISIS gets its hashtag into the @ActiveHashtags stream, it results in an average
of 72 retweets per tweet, which only makes the hashtag trend more. As it gains traction,
more users are exposed to ISIS’s messaging. The group’s supporters also run accounts
similar to @ActiveHashtags that exclusively feature jihadi content and can produce
hundreds of retweets per tweet.

ISIS uses hashtags to focus-group messaging and branding concepts.

As a result of these strategies, and others, ISIS is able to project strength and promote
engagement online. For instance, the ISIS hashtag consistently outperforms that of the
group’s main competitor in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, even though the two groups have a
similar number of supporters online. In data I analyzed in February, ISIS often
registered more than 10,000 mentions of its hashtag per day, while the number of al-
Nusra mentions generally ranged between 2,500 and 5,000.

ISIS also uses hashtags to focus-group messaging and branding concepts, much like a
Western corporation might. Earlier this year, ISIS hinted, without being specific, that it
was planning to change the name of its organization. Activists then carefully promoted
a hashtag crafted to look like a grassroots initiative, demanding that ISIS leader Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi declare not an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq, but the rebirth of an
Islamic caliphate. The question of when and how to declare a new caliphate is highly
controversial in jihadi circles, and the hashtag produced a great deal of angry and
divisive discussion, which ISIS very likely tracked and measured. It never announced
a name change.

Media attention has focused, not unreasonably, on ISIS’s use of social media to spread
pictures of graphic violence, attract new fighters, and incite lone wolves. But it’s
important to recognize that these activities are supported by sophisticated online
machinery. ISIS does have legitimate support online—but less than it might seem. And
it owes a lot of that support to a calculated campaign that would put American social-
media-marketing gurus to shame.

J.M. BERGER is a co-author of ISIS: The State of Terror and an associate fellow
with the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism—The Hague.
 SKIP TO CONTENT

What ISIS Really Wants

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group
with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the
coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to
stop it.

 BY GRAEME WOOD MARCH 2015 ISSUE OF THE ATLANTIC

WHAT IS THE ISLAMIC STATE?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these
questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the
answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments
by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for
the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun
figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he
said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama
has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s
“jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may
have contributed to significant strategic errors.

What to Do About ISIS?

The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than
the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May
2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a
grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the
occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of
the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the
first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-
definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all
Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was
unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a

hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on
camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other
propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters
have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their
state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that
its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of
change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers
itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.

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The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS),
follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of
Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and
predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers
apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which
David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a
few hundred people, but some 8 million.

We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways.
First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al-Qaeda
to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters
I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor.
But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003,
and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.

Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect
to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a
geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by
contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to
rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory
into provinces.)

The Roots of the Islamic State’s Appeal

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign

to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who
produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy
War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern
secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He
requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces
from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently.
On Mohamed Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner
at Pizza Hut.

An interview with Graeme Wood: The author describes how he tracked down
the world’s most influential recruiters for the Islamic State—and how they
reacted after reading this story.

There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern

secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious
disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group
does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered
commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment,
and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s
officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In
conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from governing
precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his
earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or
old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of
early Islam.

To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the

Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such
as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,”
poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears,
the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—
juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular
homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also
referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”)

But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with
theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly
echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless
the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the
lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has
attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the
disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion
preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned
interpretations of Islam.

Could ISIS Exist Without Islam?

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State
adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its
billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,”
which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in
punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But
pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology
that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to
underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get
acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a
way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own
excessive zeal.

Control of territory is an essential precondition for the Islamic State’s

authority in the eyes of its supporters. This map, adapted from the work of the
Institute for the Study of War, shows the territory under the caliphate’s
control as of January 15, along with areas it has attacked. Where it holds
power, the state collects taxes, regulates prices, operates courts, and
administers services ranging from health care and education to
telecommunications.

I. Devotion

In November, the Islamic State released an infomercial-like video tracing its

origins to bin Laden. It acknowledged Abu Musa’b al Zarqawi, the brutal head
of al-Qaeda in Iraq from roughly 2003 until his killing in 2006, as a more
immediate progenitor, followed sequentially by two other guerrilla leaders
before Baghdadi, the caliph. Notably unmentioned: bin Laden’s successor,
Ayman al Zawahiri, the owlish Egyptian eye surgeon who currently heads
al-Qaeda. Zawahiri has not pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, and he is
increasingly hated by his fellow jihadists. His isolation is not helped by his
lack of charisma; in videos he comes across as squinty and annoyed. But the
split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State has been long in the making, and
begins to explain, at least in part, the outsize bloodlust of the latter.
Zawahiri’s companion in isolation is a Jordanian cleric named Abu
Muhammad al Maqdisi, 55, who has a fair claim to being al-Qaeda’s
intellectual architect and the most important jihadist unknown to the average
American newspaper reader. On most matters of doctrine, Maqdisi and the
Islamic State agree. Both are closely identified with the jihadist wing of a
branch of Sunnism called Salafism, after the Arabic al salaf al salih, the “pious
forefathers.” These forefathers are the Prophet himself and his earliest
adherents, whom Salafis honor and emulate as the models for all behavior,
including warfare, couture, family life, even dentistry.

The Islamic State awaits the army

of “Rome,” whose defeat at
Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the
countdown to the apocalypse.
Maqdisi taught Zarqawi, who went to war in Iraq with the older man’s advice
in mind. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his mentor in fanaticism, and
eventually earned his rebuke. At issue was Zarqawi’s penchant for bloody
spectacle—and, as a matter of doctrine, his hatred of other Muslims, to the
point of excommunicating and killing them. In Islam, the practice of takfir, or
excommunication, is theologically perilous. “If a man says to his brother, ‘You
are an infidel,’ ” the Prophet said, “then one of them is right.” If the accuser is
wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The
punishment for apostasy is death. And yet Zarqawi heedlessly expanded the
range of behavior that could make Muslims infidels.

Maqdisi wrote to his former pupil that he needed to exercise caution and “not
issue sweeping proclamations of takfir” or “proclaim people to be apostates
because of their sins.” The distinction between apostate and sinner may
appear subtle, but it is a key point of contention between al-Qaeda and the
Islamic State.

What Motivates Terrorists?

Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is

straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the
position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include,
in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving
one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax
about calling other people apostates. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are,
meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as
innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. (The
Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the
graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in
the example of the Prophet.) That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked
for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have
elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws
not made by God.

Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the

world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from
its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-
media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more
or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates”
are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it
appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi
permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and
acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not
in dispute.

Musa Cerantonio, an Australian preacher reported to be one of the Islamic

State’s most influential recruiters, believes it is foretold that the caliphate will
sack Istanbul before it is beaten back by an army led by the anti-Messiah,
whose eventual death— when just a few thousand jihadists remain—will usher
in the apocalypse. (Paul Jeffers / Fairfax Media)

CENTURIES HAVE PASSED since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since
men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes.
Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have
greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to
believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking
or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.

Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past, Westerners who accused

Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from
academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling
Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look
instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies
arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living
in lands valued only for their oil.

Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the

Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of
ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology
doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally
irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu
akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious
reasons.

The Phony Islam of ISIS

Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic
State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast
majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with
public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic
State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the
leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically
correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what
their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the
Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-
nonsense tradition.”

Every academic I asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent me to Haykel.
Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the United
States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee, there is a hint
of an unplaceable foreign accent.

According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with
religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers
spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and
repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.”
He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as
preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to
absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if
there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret
their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic
State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”

All Muslims acknowledge that Muhammad’s earliest conquests were not tidy
affairs, and that the laws of war passed down in the Koran and in the
narrations of the Prophet’s rule were calibrated to fit a turbulent and violent
time. In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic
throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war.
This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to
prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. “Slavery,
crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are
cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State
fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it
wholesale into the present day.”

Our failure to appreciate the essential differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda
has led to dangerous decisions.

The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for
enemies of Islam. The tax on Christians finds clear endorsement in the Surah
Al-Tawba, the Koran’s ninth chapter, which instructs Muslims to fight
Christians and Jews “until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel
themselves subdued.” The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary,
imposed these rules and owned slaves.

Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict

duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of
years. “What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the
seriousness with which they read these texts,” Haykel said. “There is an
assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.”

Before the rise of the Islamic State, no group in the past few centuries had
attempted more-radical fidelity to the Prophetic model than the Wahhabis of
18th-century Arabia. They conquered most of what is now Saudi Arabia, and
their strict practices survive in a diluted version of Sharia there. Haykel sees
an important distinction between the groups, though: “The Wahhabis were
not wanton in their violence.” They were surrounded by Muslims, and they
conquered lands that were already Islamic; this stayed their hand. “ISIS, by
contrast, is really reliving the early period.” Early Muslims were surrounded
by non-Muslims, and the Islamic State, because of its takfiri tendencies,
considers itself to be in the same situation.
The Zoolander Theory of Terrorism

If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it?
Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public
sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even
some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to
embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your
Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman,
promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that
time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your
sons as slaves at the slave market.”

In October, Dabiq, the magazine of the Islamic State, published “The Revival
of Slavery Before the Hour,” an article that took up the question of whether
Yazidis (the members of an ancient Kurdish sect that borrows elements of
Islam, and had come under attack from Islamic State forces in northern Iraq)
are lapsed Muslims, and therefore marked for death, or merely pagans and
therefore fair game for enslavement. A study group of Islamic State scholars
had convened, on government orders, to resolve this issue. If they are pagans,
the article’s anonymous author wrote,

Yazidi women and children [are to be] divided according to the Shariah
amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar
operations [in northern Iraq] … Enslaving the families of the kuffar[infidels]
and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the
Shariah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the
verses of the Koran and the narrations of the Prophet … and thereby
apostatizing from Islam.

II. Territory

Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are thought to have immigrated to the

Islamic State. Recruits hail from France, the United Kingdom, Belgium,
Germany, Holland, Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and many other
places. Many have come to fight, and many intend to die.

Peter R. Neumann, a professor at King’s College London, told me that online

voices have been essential to spreading propaganda and ensuring that
newcomers know what to believe. Online recruitment has also widened the
demographics of the jihadist community, by allowing conservative Muslim
women—physically isolated in their homes—to reach out to recruiters,
radicalize, and arrange passage to Syria. Through its appeals to both genders,
the Islamic State hopes to build a complete society.

In November, I traveled to Australia to meet Musa Cerantonio, a 30-year-old

man whom Neumann and other researchers had identified as one of the two
most important “new spiritual authorities” guiding foreigners to join the
Islamic State. For three years he was a televangelist on Iqraa TV in Cairo, but
he left after the station objected to his frequent calls to establish a caliphate.
Now he preaches on Facebook and Twitter.

Pilgrims to the Islamic State

Cerantonio—a big, friendly man with a bookish demeanor—told me he

blanches at beheading videos. He hates seeing the violence, even though
supporters of the Islamic State are required to endorse it. (He speaks out,
controversially among jihadists, against suicide bombing, on the grounds that
God forbids suicide; he differs from the Islamic State on a few other points as
well.) He has the kind of unkempt facial hair one sees on certain overgrown
fans of The Lord of the Rings, and his obsession with Islamic apocalypticism
felt familiar. He seemed to be living out a drama that looks, from an outsider’s
perspective, like a medieval fantasy novel, only with real blood.

Last June, Cerantonio and his wife tried to emigrate—he wouldn’t say to
where (“It’s illegal to go to Syria,” he said cagily)—but they were caught en
route, in the Philippines, and he was deported back to Australia for
overstaying his visa. Australia has criminalized attempts to join or travel to the
Islamic State, and has confiscated Cerantonio’s passport. He is stuck in
Melbourne, where he is well known to the local constabulary. If Cerantonio
were caught facilitating the movement of individuals to the Islamic State, he
would be imprisoned. So far, though, he is free—a technically unaffiliated
ideologue who nonetheless speaks with what other jihadists have taken to be a
reliable voice on matters of the Islamic State’s doctrine.

We met for lunch in Footscray, a dense, multicultural Melbourne suburb that’s

home to Lonely Planet, the travel-guide publisher. Cerantonio grew up there
in a half-Irish, half-Calabrian family. On a typical street one can find African
restaurants, Vietnamese shops, and young Arabs walking around in the Salafi
uniform of scraggly beard, long shirt, and trousers ending halfway down the
calves.

Cerantonio explained the joy he felt when Baghdadi was declared the caliph on
June 29—and the sudden, magnetic attraction that Mesopotamia began to
exert on him and his friends. “I was in a hotel [in the Philippines], and I saw
the declaration on television,” he told me. “And I was just amazed, and I’m
like, Why am I stuck here in this bloody room?”

The last caliphate was the Ottoman empire, which reached its peak in the 16th
century and then experienced a long decline, until the founder of the Republic
of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, euthanized it in 1924. But Cerantonio, like
many supporters of the Islamic State, doesn’t acknowledge that caliphate as
legitimate, because it didn’t fully enforce Islamic law, which requires stonings
and slavery and amputations, and because its caliphs were not descended
from the tribe of the Prophet, the Quraysh.

Baghdadi spoke at length of the importance of the caliphate in his Mosul

sermon. He said that to revive the institution of the caliphate—which had not
functioned except in name for about 1,000 years—was a communal obligation.
He and his loyalists had “hastened to declare the caliphate and place an imam”
at its head, he said. “This is a duty upon the Muslims—a duty that has been
lost for centuries … The Muslims sin by losing it, and they must always seek to
establish it.” Like bin Laden before him, Baghdadi spoke floridly, with
frequent scriptural allusion and command of classical rhetoric. Unlike bin
Laden, and unlike those false caliphs of the Ottoman empire, he is Qurayshi.

The caliphate, Cerantonio told me, is not just a political entity but also a
vehicle for salvation. Islamic State propaganda regularly reports the pledges
of baya’a(allegiance) rolling in from jihadist groups across the Muslim world.
Cerantonio quoted a Prophetic saying, that to die without pledging allegiance
is to die jahil(ignorant) and therefore die a “death of disbelief.” Consider how
Muslims (or, for that matter, Christians) imagine God deals with the souls of
people who die without learning about the one true religion. They are neither
obviously saved nor definitively condemned. Similarly, Cerantonio said, the
Muslim who acknowledges one omnipotent god and prays, but who dies
without pledging himself to a valid caliph and incurring the obligations of that
oath, has failed to live a fully Islamic life. I pointed out that this means the vast
majority of Muslims in history, and all who passed away between 1924 and
2014, died a death of disbelief. Cerantonio nodded gravely. “I would go so far
as to say that Islam has been reestablished” by the caliphate.
ISIS and the Foreign-Fighter Phenomenon

I asked him about his own baya’a, and he quickly corrected me: “I didn’t say
that I’d pledged allegiance.” Under Australian law, he reminded me,
giving baya’a to the Islamic State was illegal. “But I agree that [Baghdadi]
fulfills the requirements,” he continued. “I’m just going to wink at you, and
you take that to mean whatever you want.”

To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law—being a

Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical
and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or authority. This last criterion,
Cerantonio said, is the hardest to fulfill, and requires that the caliph have
territory in which he can enforce Islamic law. Baghdadi’s Islamic State
achieved that long before June 29, Cerantonio said, and as soon as it did, a
Western convert within the group’s ranks—Cerantonio described him as
“something of a leader”—began murmuring about the religious obligation to
declare a caliphate. He and others spoke quietly to those in power and told
them that further delay would be sinful.

Social-media posts from the Islamic State suggest that executions happen
more or less continually.

Cerantonio said a faction arose that was prepared to make war on Baghdadi’s
group if it delayed any further. They prepared a letter to various powerful
members of ISIS, airing their displeasure at the failure to appoint a caliph, but
were pacified by Adnani, the spokesman, who let them in on a secret—that a
caliphate had already been declared, long before the public announcement.
They had their legitimate caliph, and at that point there was only one option.
“If he’s legitimate,” Cerantonio said, “you must give him the baya’a.”

How ISIS Territory Has Changed Since the U.S. Bombing Campaign Began

After Baghdadi’s July sermon, a stream of jihadists began flowing daily into
Syria with renewed motivation. Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German author and
former politician who visited the Islamic State in December, reported the
arrival of 100 fighters at one Turkish-border recruitment station in just two
days. His report, among others, suggests a still-steady inflow of foreigners,
ready to give up everything at home for a shot at paradise in the worst place on
Earth.

Bernard Haykel, the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State’s

ideology, believes the group is trying to re-create the earliest days of Islam and
is faithfully reproducing its norms of war. “There is an assiduous, obsessive
seriousness” about the group’s dedication to the text of the Koran, he says.
(Peter Murphy)

IN LONDON, a week before my meal with Cerantonio, I met with three ex-
members of a banned Islamist group called Al Muhajiroun (The Emigrants):
Anjem Choudary, Abu Baraa, and Abdul Muhid. They all expressed desire to
emigrate to the Islamic State, as many of their colleagues already had, but the
authorities had confiscated their passports. Like Cerantonio, they regarded the
caliphate as the only righteous government on Earth, though none would
confess having pledged allegiance. Their principal goal in meeting me was to
explain what the Islamic State stands for, and how its policies reflect God’s
law.

Choudary, 48, is the group’s former leader. He frequently appears on cable

news, as one of the few people producers can book who will defend the Islamic
State vociferously, until his mike is cut. He has a reputation in the United
Kingdom as a loathsome blowhard, but he and his disciples sincerely believe
in the Islamic State and, on matters of doctrine, speak in its voice. Choudary
and the others feature prominently in the Twitter feeds of Islamic State
residents, and Abu Baraa maintains a YouTube channel to answer questions
about Sharia.

Since September, authorities have been investigating the three men on

suspicion of supporting terrorism. Because of this investigation, they had to
meet me separately: communication among them would have violated the
terms of their bail. But speaking with them felt like speaking with the same
person wearing different masks. Choudary met me in a candy shop in the East
London suburb of Ilford. He was dressed smartly, in a crisp blue tunic
reaching nearly to his ankles, and sipped a Red Bull while we talked.

Before the caliphate, “maybe 85 percent of the Sharia was absent from our
lives,” Choudary told me. “These laws are in abeyance until we have khilafa”—
a caliphate—“and now we have one.” Without a caliphate, for example,
individual vigilantes are not obliged to amputate the hands of thieves they
catch in the act. But create a caliphate, and this law, along with a huge body of
other jurisprudence, suddenly awakens. In theory, all Muslims are obliged to
immigrate to the territory where the caliph is applying these laws. One of
Choudary’s prize students, a convert from Hinduism named Abu Rumaysah,
evaded police to bring his family of five from London to Syria in November.
On the day I met Choudary, Abu Rumaysah tweeted out a picture of himself
with a Kalashnikov in one arm and his newborn son in the other. Hashtag:
#GenerationKhilafah.

The caliph is required to implement Sharia. Any deviation will compel those
who have pledged allegiance to inform the caliph in private of his error and, in
extreme cases, to excommunicate and replace him if he persists. (“I have been
plagued with this great matter, plagued with this responsibility, and it is a
heavy responsibility,” Baghdadi said in his sermon.) In return, the caliph
commands obedience—and those who persist in supporting non-Muslim
governments, after being duly warned and educated about their sin, are
considered apostates.

How ISIS Got Its Flag

Choudary said Sharia has been misunderstood because of its incomplete

application by regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which does behead murderers
and cut off thieves’ hands. “The problem,” he explained, “is that when places
like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don’t provide the social
and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole package—they simply engender
hatred toward the Sharia.” That whole package, he said, would include free
housing, food, and clothing for all, though of course anyone who wished to
enrich himself with work could do so.

Abdul Muhid, 32, continued along these lines. He was dressed in mujahideen
chic when I met him at a local restaurant: scruffy beard, Afghan cap, and a
wallet outside of his clothes, attached with what looked like a shoulder holster.
When we sat down, he was eager to discuss welfare. The Islamic State may
have medieval-style punishments for moral crimes (lashes for boozing or
fornication, stoning for adultery), but its social-welfare program is, at least in
some aspects, progressive to a degree that would please an MSNBC pundit.
Health care, he said, is free. (“Isn’t it free in Britain, too?,” I asked. “Not
really,” he said. “Some procedures aren’t covered, such as vision.”) This
provision of social welfare was not, he said, a policy choice of the Islamic
State, but a policy obligation inherent in God’s law.
 Anjem Choudary, London’s most notorious defender of the Islamic State,
says crucifixion and beheading are sacred requirements. (Tal Cohen / Reuters)

III. The Apocalypse

All Muslims acknowledge that God is the only one who knows the future. But
they also agree that he has offered us a peek at it, in the Koran and in
narrations of the Prophet. The Islamic State differs from nearly every other
current jihadist movement in believing that it is written into God’s script as a
central character. It is in this casting that the Islamic State is most boldly
distinctive from its predecessors, and clearest in the religious nature of its
mission.

In broad strokes, al-Qaeda acts like an underground political movement, with

worldly goals in sight at all times—the expulsion of non-Muslims from the
Arabian peninsula, the abolishment of the state of Israel, the end of support
for dictatorships in Muslim lands. The Islamic State has its share of worldly
concerns (including, in the places it controls, collecting garbage and keeping
the water running), but the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda. Bin
Laden rarely mentioned the apocalypse, and when he did, he seemed to
presume that he would be long dead when the glorious moment of divine
comeuppance finally arrived. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri are from elite Sunni
families who look down on this kind of speculation and think it’s something
the masses engage in,” says Will McCants of the Brookings Institution, who is
writing a book about the Islamic State’s apocalyptic thought.

During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic State’s
immediate founding fathers, by contrast, saw signs of the end times
everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of the Mahdi—a
messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to victory before the end of the
world. McCants says a prominent Islamist in Iraq approached bin Laden in
2008 to warn him that the group was being led by millenarians who were
“talking all the time about the Mahdi and making strategic decisions” based on
when they thought the Mahdi was going to arrive. “Al-Qaeda had to write to
[these leaders] to say ‘Cut it out.’ ”

For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil
battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need. Of
the Islamic State supporters I met, Musa Cerantonio, the Australian,
expressed the deepest interest in the apocalypse and how the remaining days
of the Islamic State—and the world—might look. Parts of that prediction are
original to him, and do not yet have the status of doctrine. But other parts are
based on mainstream Sunni sources and appear all over the Islamic State’s
propaganda. These include the belief that there will be only 12 legitimate
caliphs, and Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome will mass to meet
the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with
an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic
conquest.

The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq,
near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated
madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant
plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set
up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s
Waterloo or its Antietam.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Has a Consumer Protection Office

“Dabiq is basically all farmland,” one Islamic State supporter recently tweeted.
“You could imagine large battles taking place there.” The Islamic State’s
propagandists drool with anticipation of this event, and constantly imply that
it will come soon. The state’s magazine quotes Zarqawi as saying, “The spark
has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify … until it burns
the crusader armies in Dabiq.” A recent propaganda video shows clips from
Hollywood war movies set in medieval times—perhaps because many of the
prophecies specify that the armies will be on horseback or carrying ancient
weapons.

Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy
army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.
Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the Islamic State’s
videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading. “Here we are, burying
the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of
your armies to arrive,” said a masked executioner in a November video,
showing the severed head of Peter (Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker
who’d been held captive for more than a year. During fighting in Iraq in
December, after mujahideen (perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen
American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms
of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts or hostesses upon the arrival of the
first guests at a party.

The Prophetic narration that foretells the Dabiq battle refers to the enemy as
Rome. Who “Rome” is, now that the pope has no army, remains a matter of
debate. But Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the Eastern Roman
empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul. We should think of
Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic that ended the last self-
identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other Islamic State sources suggest that
Rome might mean any infidel army, and the Americans will do nicely.

After mujahideen reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic

State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic
hosts upon the arrival of the first guests at a party.

After its battle in Dabiq, Cerantonio said, the caliphate will expand and sack
Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the entire Earth, but Cerantonio
suggested its tide may never reach beyond the Bosporus. An anti-Messiah,
known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the
Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s
fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal
prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the second-most-revered prophet in
Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.

“Only God knows” whether the Islamic State’s armies are the ones foretold,
Cerantonio said. But he is hopeful. “The Prophet said that one sign of the
imminent arrival of the End of Days is that people will for a long while stop
talking about the End of Days,” he said. “If you go to the mosques now, you’ll
find the preachers are silent about this subject.” On this theory, even setbacks
dealt to the Islamic State mean nothing, since God has preordained the near-
destruction of his people anyway. The Islamic State has its best and worst days
ahead of it.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declared caliph by his followers last summer.
The establishment of a caliphate awakened large sections of Koranic law that
had lain dormant, and required those Muslims who recognized the caliphate
to immigrate. (AP)

IV. The Fight

The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating virtue: it
allows us to predict some of the group’s actions. Osama bin Laden was seldom
predictable. He ended his first television interview cryptically. CNN’s Peter
Arnett asked him, “What are your future plans?” Bin Laden replied, “You’ll see
them and hear about them in the media, God willing.” By contrast, the Islamic
State boasts openly about its plans—not all of them, but enough so that by
listening carefully, we can deduce how it intends to govern and expand.
In London, Choudary and his students provided detailed descriptions of how
the Islamic State must conduct its foreign policy, now that it is a caliphate. It
has already taken up what Islamic law refers to as “offensive jihad,” the
forcible expansion into countries that are ruled by non-Muslims. “Hitherto, we
were just defending ourselves,” Choudary said; without a caliphate, offensive
jihad is an inapplicable concept. But the waging of war to expand the caliphate
is an essential duty of the caliph.

Choudary took pains to present the laws of war under which the Islamic State
operates as policies of mercy rather than of brutality. He told me the state has
an obligation to terrorize its enemies—a holy order to scare the shit out of
them with beheadings and crucifixions and enslavement of women and
children, because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.

Choudary’s colleague Abu Baraa explained that Islamic law permits only
temporary peace treaties, lasting no longer than a decade. Similarly, accepting
any border is anathema, as stated by the Prophet and echoed in the Islamic
State’s propaganda videos. If the caliph consents to a longer-term peace or
permanent border, he will be in error. Temporary peace treaties are
renewable, but may not be applied to all enemies at once: the caliph must
wage jihad at least once a year. He may not rest, or he will fall into a state of
sin.

One comparison to the Islamic State is the Khmer Rouge, which killed about a
third of the population of Cambodia. But the Khmer Rouge occupied
Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. “This is not permitted,” Abu Baraa
said. “To send an ambassador to the UN is to recognize an authority other
than God’s.” This form of diplomacy is shirk, or polytheism, he argued, and
would be immediate cause to hereticize and replace Baghdadi. Even to hasten
the arrival of a caliphate by democratic means—for example by voting for
political candidates who favor a caliphate—is shirk.

It’s hard to overstate how hamstrung the Islamic State will be by its
radicalism. The modern international system, born of the 1648 Peace of
Westphalia, relies on each state’s willingness to recognize borders, however
grudgingly. For the Islamic State, that recognition is ideological suicide. Other
Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, have
succumbed to the blandishments of democracy and the potential for an
invitation to the community of nations, complete with a UN seat. Negotiation
and accommodation have worked, at times, for the Taliban as well. (Under
Taliban rule, Afghanistan exchanged ambassadors with Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, an act that invalidated the Taliban’s
authority in the Islamic State’s eyes.) To the Islamic State these are not
options, but acts of apostasy.

THE UNITED STATES and its allies have reacted to the Islamic State belatedly
and in an apparent daze. The group’s ambitions and rough strategic blueprints
were evident in its pronouncements and in social-media chatter as far back as
2011, when it was just one of many terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq and
hadn’t yet committed mass atrocities. Adnani, the spokesman, told followers
then that the group’s ambition was to “restore the Islamic caliphate,” and he
evoked the apocalypse, saying, “There are but a few days left.” Baghdadi had
already styled himself “commander of the faithful,” a title ordinarily reserved
for caliphs, in 2011. In April 2013, Adnani declared the movement “ready to
redraw the world upon the Prophetic methodology of the caliphate.” In August
2013, he said, “Our goal is to establish an Islamic state that doesn’t recognize
borders, on the Prophetic methodology.” By then, the group had taken Raqqa,
a Syrian provincial capital of perhaps 500,000 people, and was drawing in
substantial numbers of foreign fighters who’d heard its message.

The Confused Person’s Guide to the Syrian Civil War

If we had identified the Islamic State’s intentions early, and realized that the
vacuum in Syria and Iraq would give it ample space to carry them out, we
might, at a minimum, have pushed Iraq to harden its border with Syria and
preemptively make deals with its Sunnis. That would at least have avoided the
electrifying propaganda effect created by the declaration of a caliphate just
after the conquest of Iraq’s third-largest city. Yet, just over a year ago, Obama
told The New Yorker that he considered ISIS to be al-Qaeda’s weaker partner.
“If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe
Bryant,” the president said.

Our failure to appreciate the split between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and
the essential differences between the two, has led to dangerous decisions. Last
fall, to take one example, the U.S. government consented to a desperate plan
to save Peter Kassig’s life. The plan facilitated—indeed, required—the
interaction of some of the founding figures of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda,
and could hardly have looked more hastily improvised.

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed
it appears the best of bad military options.
It entailed the enlistment of Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, the Zarqawi mentor
and al-Qaeda grandee, to approach Turki al-Binali, the Islamic State’s chief
ideologue and a former student of Maqdisi’s, even though the two men had
fallen out due to Maqdisi’s criticism of the Islamic State. Maqdisi had already
called for the state to extend mercy to Alan Henning, the British cabbie who
had entered Syria to deliver aid to children. In December, The
Guardian reported that the U.S. government, through an intermediary, had
asked Maqdisi to intercede with the Islamic State on Kassig’s behalf.

Maqdisi was living freely in Jordan, but had been banned from
communicating with terrorists abroad, and was being monitored closely. After
Jordan granted the United States permission to reintroduce Maqdisi to Binali,
Maqdisi bought a phone with American money and was allowed to correspond
merrily with his former student for a few days, before the Jordanian
government stopped the chats and used them as a pretext to jail Maqdisi.
Kassig’s severed head appeared in the Dabiq video a few days later.

Maqdisi gets mocked roundly on Twitter by the Islamic State’s fans, and
al-Qaeda is held in great contempt for refusing to acknowledge the caliphate.
Cole Bunzel, a scholar who studies Islamic State ideology, read Maqdisi’s
opinion on Henning’s status and thought it would hasten his and other
captives’ death. “If I were held captive by the Islamic State and Maqdisi said I
shouldn’t be killed,” he told me, “I’d kiss my ass goodbye.”

Kassig’s death was a tragedy, but the plan’s success would have been a bigger
one. A reconciliation between Maqdisi and Binali would have begun to heal
the main rift between the world’s two largest jihadist organizations. It’s
possible that the government wanted only to draw out Binali for intelligence
purposes or assassination. (Multiple attempts to elicit comment from the FBI
were unsuccessful.) Regardless, the decision to play matchmaker for America’s
two main terrorist antagonists reveals astonishingly poor judgment.

CHASTENED BY OUR EARLIER INDIFFERENCE, we are now meeting the Islamic

State via Kurdish and Iraqi proxy on the battlefield, and with regular air
assaults. Those strategies haven’t dislodged the Islamic State from any of its
major territorial possessions, although they’ve kept it from directly assaulting
Baghdad and Erbil and slaughtering Shia and Kurds there.

Some observers have called for escalation, including several predictable voices
from the interventionist right (Max Boot, Frederick Kagan), who have urged
the deployment of tens of thousands of American soldiers. These calls should
not be dismissed too quickly: an avowedly genocidal organization is on its
potential victims’ front lawn, and it is committing daily atrocities in the
territory it already controls.

Why It’s So Hard to Stop ISIS Propaganda

One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to
overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under
caliphate rule. Al-Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like,
by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its
territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot
exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a
requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of
allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to
attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda
value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty
to immigrate and serve it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic
State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast
resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in
full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.

Abu Baraa, who maintains a YouTube channel about Islamic law, says the
caliph, Baghdadi, cannot negotiate or recognize borders, and must continually
make war, or he will remove himself from Islam.

And yet the risks of escalation are enormous. The biggest proponent of an
American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which
a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly
made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda
victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether they have
given baya’a to the caliph, they all believe that the United States wants to
embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims. Yet another invasion and
occupation would confirm that suspicion, and bolster recruitment. Add the
incompetence of our previous efforts as occupiers, and we have reason for
reluctance. The rise of ISIS, after all, happened only because our previous
occupation created space for Zarqawi and his followers. Who knows the
consequences of another botched job?

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed
it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military
options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole
Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite
for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from
fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to expand, it
resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet
another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity to its people.

The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State’s existence is high. But its threat to
the United States is smaller than its all too frequent conflation with al-Qaeda
would suggest. Al-Qaeda’s core is rare among jihadist groups for its focus on
the “far enemy” (the West); most jihadist groups’ main concerns lie closer to
home. That’s especially true of the Islamic State, precisely because of its
ideology. It sees enemies everywhere around it, and while its leadership
wishes ill on the United States, the application of Sharia in the caliphate and
the expansion to contiguous lands are paramount. Baghdadi has said as much
directly: in November he told his Saudi agents to “deal with the rafida [Shia]
first … then al-Sulul [Sunni supporters of the Saudi monarchy] … before the
crusaders and their bases.”

Musa Cerantonio and Anjem Choudary could mentally shift from

contemplating mass death to discussing the virtues of Vietnamese coffee, with
apparent delight in each.

The foreign fighters (and their wives and children) have been traveling to the
caliphate on one-way tickets: they want to live under true Sharia, and many
want martyrdom. Doctrine, recall, requires believers to reside in the caliphate
if it is at all possible for them to do so. One of the Islamic State’s less bloody
videos shows a group of jihadists burning their French, British, and Australian
passports. This would be an eccentric act for someone intending to return to
blow himself up in line at the Louvre or to hold another chocolate shop
hostage in Sydney.

A Change of Strategy for ISIS?

A few “lone wolf” supporters of the Islamic State have attacked Western
targets, and more attacks will come. But most of the attackers have been
frustrated amateurs, unable to immigrate to the caliphate because of
confiscated passports or other problems. Even if the Islamic State cheers these
attacks—and it does in its propaganda—it hasn’t yet planned and financed one.
(The Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in January was principally an al-Qaeda
operation.) During his visit to Mosul in December, Jürgen Todenhöfer
interviewed a portly German jihadist and asked whether any of his comrades
had returned to Europe to carry out attacks. The jihadist seemed to regard
returnees not as soldiers but as dropouts. “The fact is that the returnees from
the Islamic State should repent from their return,” he said. “I hope they review
their religion.”

Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No

country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The
land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it
stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the
agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more
reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will
be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by
violence. This is what it looks like.

Even so, the death of the Islamic State is unlikely to be quick, and things could
still go badly wrong: if the Islamic State obtained the allegiance of al-Qaeda—
increasing, in one swoop, the unity of its base—it could wax into a worse foe
than we’ve yet seen. The rift between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda has, if
anything, grown in the past few months; the December issue of Dabiq featured
a long account of an al-Qaeda defector who described his old group as corrupt
and ineffectual, and Zawahiri as a distant and unfit leader. But we should
watch carefully for a rapprochement.

Without a catastrophe such as this, however, or perhaps the threat of the

Islamic State’s storming Erbil, a vast ground invasion would certainly make
the situation worse.

V. Dissuasion

It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State “a
problem with Islam.” The religion allows many interpretations, and Islamic
State supporters are morally on the hook for the one they choose. And yet
simply denouncing the Islamic State as un-Islamic can be counterproductive,
especially if those who hear the message have read the holy texts and seen the
endorsement of many of the caliphate’s practices written plainly within them.

Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is
wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot
condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and
the example of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic
State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional
teachings of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really
would be an act of apostasy.

The Islamic State’s ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the
population. Life’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish in its face. Musa
Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: no question I
posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts
their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite
them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing
maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the
psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But
these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good
graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as
much as anything else.

NON-MUSLIMS CANNOT TELL Muslims how to practice their religion properly.

But Muslims have long since begun this debate within their own ranks. “You
have to have standards,” Anjem Choudary told me. “Somebody could claim to
be a Muslim, but if he believes in homosexuality or drinking alcohol, then he is
not a Muslim. There is no such thing as a nonpracticing vegetarian.”

ISIS Against Humanity

There is, however, another strand of Islam that offers a hard-line alternative to
the Islamic State—just as uncompromising, but with opposite conclusions.
This strand has proved appealing to many Muslims cursed or blessed with a
psychological longing to see every jot and tittle of the holy texts implemented
as they were in the earliest days of Islam. Islamic State supporters know how
to react to Muslims who ignore parts of the Koran: with takfir and ridicule.
But they also know that some other Muslims read the Koran as assiduously as
they do, and pose a real ideological threat.

Baghdadi is Salafi. The term Salafi has been villainized, in part because
authentic villains have ridden into battle waving the Salafi banner. But most
Salafis are not jihadists, and most adhere to sects that reject the Islamic State.
They are, as Haykel notes, committed to expanding Dar al-Islam, the land of
Islam, even, perhaps, with the implementation of monstrous practices such as
slavery and amputation—but at some future point. Their first priority is
personal purification and religious observance, and they believe anything that
thwarts those goals—such as causing war or unrest that would disrupt lives
and prayer and scholarship—is forbidden.
They live among us. Last fall, I visited the Philadelphia mosque of Breton
Pocius, 28, a Salafi imam who goes by the name Abdullah. His mosque is on
the border between the crime-ridden Northern Liberties neighborhood and a
gentrifying area that one might call Dar al-Hipster; his beard allows him to
pass in the latter zone almost unnoticed.

A theological alternative to the Islamic State exists—just as uncompromising,

but with opposite conclusions.

Pocius converted 15 years ago after a Polish Catholic upbringing in Chicago.

Like Cerantonio, he talks like an old soul, exhibiting deep familiarity with
ancient texts, and a commitment to them motivated by curiosity and
scholarship, and by a conviction that they are the only way to escape hellfire.
When I met him at a local coffee shop, he carried a work of Koranic
scholarship in Arabic and a book for teaching himself Japanese. He was
preparing a sermon on the obligations of fatherhood for the 150 or so
worshipers in his Friday congregation.

The Pre-Terrorists Among Us

Pocius said his main goal is to encourage a halal life for worshipers in his
mosque. But the rise of the Islamic State has forced him to consider political
questions that are usually very far from the minds of Salafis. “Most of what
they’ll say about how to pray and how to dress is exactly what I’ll say in
my masjid [mosque]. But when they get to questions about social upheaval,
they sound like Che Guevara.”

When Baghdadi showed up, Pocius adopted the slogan “Not my khalifa.” “The
times of the Prophet were a time of great bloodshed,” he told me, “and he
knew that the worst possible condition for all people was chaos, especially
within the umma[Muslim community].” Accordingly, Pocius said, the correct
attitude for Salafis is not to sow discord by factionalizing and declaring fellow
Muslims apostates.

Instead, Pocius—like a majority of Salafis—believes that Muslims should

remove themselves from politics. These quietist Salafis, as they are known,
agree with the Islamic State that God’s law is the only law, and they eschew
practices like voting and the creation of political parties. But they interpret the
Koran’s hatred of discord and chaos as requiring them to fall into line with just
about any leader, including some manifestly sinful ones. “The Prophet said: as
long as the ruler does not enter into clear kufr [disbelief], give him general
obedience,” Pocius told me, and the classic “books of creed” all warn against
causing social upheaval. Quietist Salafis are strictly forbidden from dividing
Muslims from one another—for example, by mass excommunication. Living
without baya’a, Pocius said, does indeed make one ignorant, or benighted.
But baya’a need not mean direct allegiance to a caliph, and certainly not to
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It can mean, more broadly, allegiance to a religious
social contract and commitment to a society of Muslims, whether ruled by a
caliph or not.

Quietist Salafis believe that Muslims should direct their energies toward
perfecting their personal life, including prayer, ritual, and hygiene. Much in
the same way ultra-Orthodox Jews debate whether it’s kosher to tear off
squares of toilet paper on the Sabbath (does that count as “rending cloth”?),
they spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring that their trousers are not
too long, that their beards are trimmed in some areas and shaggy in others.
Through this fastidious observance, they believe, God will favor them with
strength and numbers, and perhaps a caliphate will arise. At that moment,
Muslims will take vengeance and, yes, achieve glorious victory at Dabiq. But
Pocius cites a slew of modern Salafi theologians who argue that a caliphate
cannot come into being in a righteous way except through the unmistakable
will of God.

The Islamic State, of course, would agree, and say that God has anointed
Baghdadi. Pocius’s retort amounts to a call to humility. He cites Abdullah Ibn
Abbas, one of the Prophet’s companions, who sat down with dissenters and
asked them how they had the gall, as a minority, to tell the majority that it was
wrong. Dissent itself, to the point of bloodshed or splitting the umma, was
forbidden. Even the manner of the establishment of Baghdadi’s caliphate runs
contrary to expectation, he said. “The khilafa is something that Allah is going
to establish,” he told me, “and it will involve a consensus of scholars from
Mecca and Medina. That is not what happened. ISIS came out of nowhere.”
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